Ideuhs are incipient thoughts

February 25, 2011

I'm always interested in learning about the thought process behind the development of brands and advertising campaigns, which is one reason I keep re-reading Sato Kashiwa's book Creative Thinking. I don't think I've come across any other writer who provides such clear thinking on the structure of the creative thought process - or at least his own process - as it pertains to solving advertising, design, and marketing assignments.

I've devoted my last several posts to the seven guidelines for creative thinking that comprise the first third of Sato's book. As a matter of fact, if you read my last post on Sato's advice for presenting, you'll find that his own approach to presentation focuses on trying to get his clients to identify with the thought process he went through in coming up with a solution to their problem. That's something - in my experience - that's actually very rare. It's that focus on process and structure that got me so interested in Sato in the first place, and inspired me to write about him as a way of internalizing his practices.

But how do Sato's guidelines play out in real life? The remainder of his book tells how Sato applied his way of thinking to real brands. Given that, with the exception of Uniqlo's global rollout, Sato's clientele is limited to Japan, they tend to be brands most Americans have never heard of. But putting cultural differences aside, a study of Sato's work provides some fascinating lessons in creativity. A great example is Suit Select, a Japanese retailer of stylish yet budget-friendly suits, offered at two price points, around $200 and $300.

When Sato was called in to rebrand what was then "Suit Select 21," he made a point of visiting one of their stores before meeting with the client. Sato makes it a practice to try to experience the brands from a consumer's point of view before the first client meeting. The reason for this is that while most marketers will tend to say they develop products from the "customer's perspective" and back it up with plenty of research, more often than not they end up following industry convention or reinforcing their own agenda. When starting a project, Sato attempts to empty his mind and take on the disinterested attitude of a shopper getting his first impression of a brand.

It was his first experience of a "two-price shop," and because Suit Select 21 focused its marketing message on its price structure - and Japan has no shortage of cheap suit emporiums - he found himself surprised by the quality of the material, which compared favorably to imported suits. His initial thought was that the quality of the suits was not being adequately communicated.

His second impression was that the product lines were somewhat haphazardly organized. In reality, there were three different lines of suits, each offered at the two price points. While the three lines were ostensibly developed to provide variety within a defined structure, in reality, the differences between each line was unclear, resulting in confusion.

Sato's solution to the first issue was to move beyond price and reposition Suit Select as more of a fashion brand, as retailers such as H&M have done with success. The overarching positioning statement was: "High-quality, stylish suits at a reasonable price, offered in a simple and logical assortment that makes it easy to select." This boiled down to a simple concept he calls "Real Suits," intended to convey authenticity and practicality.

One thing you will notice if you look at enough of Sato's work is that he doesn't stop at positioning and messaging, but has a talent for getting under the hood and making substantive changes to the business. In this case, he persuaded Suit Select's management to rationalize the product structure by narrowing their product lines from three to two, and creating greater contrast between the two product families. There would be a "Silver Line" and a "Black Line," one being a more traditional cut, and the other more contemporary and edgy. Sato even got involved in the design of each line, adjusting arm holes, pocket angles, and button placements

To his surprise, the recommendations were enthusiastically supported by the company's design and manufacturing people, who admitted that they themselves had been confused by the differences between the three lines. Sato's brand restructuring freed them to design with greater confidence of purpose, while making it easier for shoppers to identify what they wanted.

To further emphasize the new product structure, and create a more intimate shopping experience, Sato redesigned Suit Select stores to resemble large walk-in closets. One wall displays the Silver Line, the other, Black. The middle of the store is occupied by a long table lined with shirts and ties.

Suit Select is a great illustration of the importance of adopting a neutral stance in marketing and creative endeavors. Even approaching things with the consciousness of taking the customer's point of view tends to build in certain preconceptions. Sato calls this more neutral perspective the "Ochanoma Perspective." The ochanoma is the family room in Japanese homes, traditionally the place where everyone gathers to watch TV. Taking the Ochanoma Perspective, for Sato, is different from the way typical marketers attempt to understand consumers, simply because you are just your own normal, and normally disinterested, attitude towards things.

In a previous chapter, Sato calls this looking at Reality rather than Research. It's a natural, common-sense approach - simple in theory - but then as we all know, naturalness is harder to achieve than we like to think.

February 02, 2011

It's great when your reading takes you full circle. About a year ago I discovered Garr Reynolds' blog and book Presentation Zen, and then about half a year later I discovered Sato Kashiwa's great book, Creative Thinking. I found the two really reinforced each other, and the connection is most apparent when Sato addresses presentation in his seventh guideline for creative thinking:

7. Capture the heart through presentation. Moving from persuasion to empathy.

If creative thinking in design is about coming up with great solutions to business problems, well, at some point you need to present your solutions. Garr Reynolds talks a lot about "presenting naked" and he's even turned that theme into yet another great book, The Naked Presenter. No, he doesn't mean you need to take your clothes off to get attention. (In fact, that would probably distract your audience from what you're trying to present - well, depending on what you're presenting.) On a basic level, he's talking about not hiding behind PowerPoint slides and simply being comfortable with what you have to say and just focusing on making your point. "The naked presenter approaches the presentation task embracing the ideas of simplicity, clarity, honesty, integrity, and passion." Yes, you're exposing yourself. You're stripping away the unnecessary props of over-decorated slides and excessive bullet points we tend to use to as a kind of defensive mechanism, anticipating questions, doubts, and arguments. Connected to Garr's Zen aesthetic, it can simply mean preparing and delivering your presentations with restraint, simplicity, and naturalness.

In Sato's way of thinking, it's also about moving away from the idea that you need to persuade or convince your audience, or in other words to force your point of view on them. Sato writes about how, when he first started in advertising, he concentrated too much performance and technique, he focused more on surface than substance. Since then, he's adopted what he calls an "extremely simple" presentation style, which is to simply explain to his client the process he went through to solve their problem.

"However skillful you are with words," he writes, "if you make too much of an effort to lead your audience, you inevitably stir up resistance." For Sato, presentation "is not the place for persuasion. It's the place for connecting with the people you are working with together." You and your client are working on a problem together. Your presentation is about getting them to understand your way of thinking about their problem.

The most important thing, Sato writes, is to present your feelings. I think this is a very good point, and it's similar to something an agency creative director once told me about how account people can best critique creative work. Rather than argue a point, he told me, it's best to simply say how the work makes you feel, because no one can argue with a feeling.

December 04, 2010

Ever since I picked up Sato Kashiwa's book Creative Thinking in a Japanese bookstore last summer, I've been fascinated by how effortlessly he seems to come up with amazing ideas for his clients. If you check out his portfolio site, you'll be amazed at the variety of his work, but what's just as amazing, the more I read about him, is the disciplined and, for lack of a better word, almost logical way he seems to arrive at breakthrough work.

I've summarized the first five of Sato's suggestions around the power of questions and visualization in getting to the root of the problems you're trying to solve, and more effectively communicating your ideas. Since then I've had my own creative challenges, and have put these principles to work, with good effect. For example, I recently won a project for Intel, after the client mentioned she liked the way I questioned her. But it's the sixth technique that I now find most fascinating, and the one that I have yet to put into practice. I'm hoping that writing about it will make it happen, because the one thing I've discovered about blogging is that it's a great way to get ideas to stick in my own head.

When you need to communicate your ideas - either visually or verbally - Sato writes, you can't have too many means of expression at your disposal. With a rich supply of expression, you can convey fresher and more accurate images to your client. And the storehouse of expression, Sato says, is memory. In other words, full self-expression can be helped by greater development and control of your memory, the ability to call up accurate expressions from memory at will.

Sato's solution is to make a habit of tagging the things you experience. Tagging is putting a label on the things that catch your attention, and consciously filing those associations in memory. Just like tagging blogs and web pages raises their search rankings, Sato's idea is that tagging perceptions increases your chances of calling them from memory later. It transforms memory into a search engine.

A good example is Sato's package design for Japanese cosmetics brand Lissage. While a premium brand in Japan, one of Lissage's issues was that it wasn't as well known as it should have been for its advanced skincare technologies. When examining the pump bottle for Lissage's Skin Maintenizer serum, he had the idea of introducing a trigger mechanism. Triggers require less force than pumps, but because they have a functional appearance reminiscent of household cleansing products, they weren't used in cosmetics. Nevertheless, Sato was intrigued by the possibilities of creating an elegant trigger package that would convey functionality and beauty at the same time. Where did he get this idea?

Some time before, Sato had been shopping for a suit in Paris when he noticed a chrome-plated fire extinguisher in the store. He was impressed by how the plating completely transformed a functional object into a thing of beauty and elegance. So he consciously made a mental tag, associating "fire extinguisher" and "chrome." When he started working on Lissage, he was able to call up this memory to produce a true product innovation: the cosmetics industry's first trigger bottle.

Developing the Habit of Tagging

So how do we get into the habit of making mental tags? Sato says that in his role as a designer, his job is to "create new value that hasn't been before," and so he has gotten into the habit of looking at things from different angles. The two most basic ways that he looks at things are from the perspective of the everyday person and that of a creator.

The "everyday" perspective is a generally neutral point of view. If you're in any kind of marketing- or communications-related work, it actually requires a bit of effort to consciously adopt this point of view (that is, when you're not in your natural everyday mode) because you need rid yourself of the preconceptions that come with wanting to communicate something.

Sato's idea of the "creative" perspective is one that tries to look objectively at one's own "everyday" persona. There are actually two creative perspectives. One is the "macro" view that looks at people's activities in terms of history and trends. The other is the "micro" view that zooms in on more personal and psychological motivations.

Some things I've discovered about my everyday mode are that I'm very easily swayed by fast-food advertising, whereas I'm not as concerned about water and energy conservation as my wife says I should be. So I guess you could call this the Homer Simpson point of view. If I look at fast food from a "creative" perspective, I might find that on the macro level, advertising for burgers is ubiquitous and well-photographed, and on the micro level, I have some prehistoric craving for carbs, salt, and fat. The point is, if you try to look at whatever happens to grab your attention from several different angles, you should be able to assign several tags to it.

Sato says he first got into the habit of tagging when he was studying to get into art school. Japanese art school entrance exams had an image association section, in which applicants have to come up with images for abstract concepts, like "sweet" or "drunk." As a high-school student without a stock of visual themes in his mind, Sato found this exercise extremely difficult. His test-prep teacher told the class that everyday life is full of idea sources, and that his students just had to adopt the creative perspective to find them. At first, Sato couldn't relate to this concept, but after daily practice, he found it became second nature.

The only training, Sato writes, is to actively assign tags to the things that strike your eye. Making this effort will gradually build up a storehouse of images in your brain that you can automatically draw upon when needed. Ask yourself, "Why do I like this?" or "Why don't I like this?" and make the words you come up with your tags. Sato finds that it's much easier to identify why you like something than why you don't like it - and that tagging things you don't like is not only great training, but also opens up the possibility of seeing ways in which you might find a way to like what you dislike.

October 23, 2010

In my previous post I introduced Sato Kashiwa's great book on Creative Thinking and talked about his first three principles, which I boil down to questioning assumptions, questioning others, and questioning ourselves. One of Japan's great contemporary designers, Sato sees design as a way to solve his clients' business problems. In order to come up with really great solutions, we first need to grasp the essential problem we're trying to solve. Hence the importance Sato places on questioning everything at the beginning of every project, and rigorously interviewing his clients to make sure the real problem is mutually understood.

Being "design mindful" or "thinking like a designer," as Garr Reynolds observes, is an approach to life that even people who aren't designers can use to help solve any number of everyday problems. For example, as a writer and a business-person, I attempt to embrace the principle of "restraint" - attempting to omit what isn't absolutely necessary.

Sato's next two principles focus on the importance of visualization to help communicate our ideas. If "creative thinking" is about discovering creative ways to solve problems, it's also about heightening our ability to communicate. As Sato repeatedly notes, "it's not easy for people to understand each other." All of Sato's creative thinking principles are essentially guides for better communication as a way for understanding and solving business and even personal problems.

4. Cultivate the habit of mitate. - Communicating the essence through analogy.

Mitate is a Japanese word that Sato attributes to tea ceremony and other Zen arts. Roughly translated, it means "analogy." Most of us have seen photos of Zen gardens, in which a few large ornamental rocks are carefully arranged within an expanse of carefully raked sand. The effect is like looking at islands in the sea. Part of the beauty of traditional Japanese gardens is that, within a small space, they evoke much larger landscapes.

In my previous post I mentioned an ad campaign for a portable photo printer that we compared to having a photo lab wherever you went. We created a series of ads in which we placed the printer in various settings like a wedding party or on the sidelines of a soccer game, together with a neon sign that read "85-Second Photo Lab." That is an example of mitate. But we can just call it analogy.

Sato says that making connections between different objects is an exercise in creative thinking that helps train the mind to grasp the essence of things, and strengthens our communicative power. To practice, he suggests making comparisons between your job and unrelated fields. For example, Sato frequently likens art directors to doctors. An art director. Like a doctor diagnosing a patient, art directors diagnose their clients' business problems and prescribe ways to treat them through design.

Great presenters use analogy to make connections that cause us to look at things from a new and different angle. The next time you need to sell an important concept, try coming up with some strong visual analogies beforehand to help make the connection with your audience.

5. Draw your work. - Visuals communicate more powerfully than words.

Mitate, or analogy, is a way of communicating pictures through words. But as Sato point out, "there are also times when it's easier to communicate without using words." There are times when it's better to simply draw pictures.

Sato makes the point that some of his most powerful product designs started from simple line drawings; for example, a cell phone proposal consisted of little more than a circle within a rectangle.

However, you don't have to be a designer for pictures to make a difference in your work. In advertising, we frequently use charts and diagrams to illustrate our plans without overloading our clients with words. The fact is, our brains process visual information more easily. I've written in a previous post about the power of infographics.

Nevertheless, most of us still treat diagrams almost as works of art in themselves. We could all benefit from getting nto the habit of using conceptual sketches to support everyday discussions. There is a great book by David Sibbet called Visual Meetings that shows how you can visually facilitate meetings. "Visualization," Sibbet writes, "Is a powerful way to resolve confusions in groups that arise from inadequate or conflicting mental models."

Next time you have a one-on-one meeting with a colleague or client, try using your notebook to sketch out ideas on the spot and see how they react. You might find that you're communicating more effectively, and mutually come up with some really creative ideas!

September 29, 2010

My Japanese isn't quite what it used to be when I lived in Japan, but whenever I visit Tokyo, I always buy a couple of books that catch my eye while wandering among the shelves of that city's great book stores. It's a great way to get the Japanese side of my brain working again and connect with what's current, but even with electronic dictionary in hand, I usually find it hard slogging, and I'll find myself still struggling to get through them on the flight home and for several weeks after, simultaneously extending the pleasure of my recent excursion and prolonging the pain of separation from the place I've come to see, ever more distantly, as my second home.

On my trip to Tokyo last summer, I found an entire shelf lined with books by and about a creative director named Sato Kashiwa. Since leaving Dentsu, where I worked for ten years, I'm not as familiar as I'd like to be with creative trends in Japan. The Sato Kashiwa shelf called to me, promising to bring me up to speed with what's happening now in the world of advertising and design. I picked up a ten-year retrospective of his work and one of his own books, Creative Thinking. I wasn't disappointed.

Creative Thinking is an amazing book that should be made available in English, so I'd like to at least make a start of introducing it here. Despite my linguistic handicap, I found myself breezing easily through this book and deeply connecting with the lessons Sato has to share. It may be that I found it easier to read because I've been doing some translation work over the past year, but it probably has more to do with the simplicity and clarity of Sato's writing, which is designed to make his deep insights into creativity accessible to all.

Sato Kashiwa, born in 1965, is a creative director who worked on many award-winning campaigns for Hakuhodo (Japan's second-biggest ad agency) before starting his own design agency, SAMURAI. Some of Japan's leading brands - such as Kirin Beer, NTT DoCoMo, and Rakuten - have turned to him for innovative thinking that goes beyond advertising, encompassing product development, retail-space and office design, and business consulting. While not yet a household name outside of Japan, he was tapped to manage the global rollout of Japanese clothing retailer UNIQLO in cities from New York to Moscow, overseeing store design, branding, and adveritising.

Creative Thinking was written with the intent of reaching a more general business audience, which is what makes it so approachable. Sato writes that design is not about artistic self-expression but about creative problem-solving:

It's the work of teasing out the passionate ideas your client can't put into words and finding a way to communicate them to society and making them real. You might also call it being a "communications consultant."

In this sense, while not written for designers per-se, Creative Thinking will inevitably have a more direct appeal to readers broadly engaged in marketing and communications, especially because his examples tend to arise from his own work. Nevertheless, Sato's lessons in "creative thinking" are truly applicable to just about anyone who wants to improve their "problem solving" ability. It's also worth nothing that some of the world's best businesses are increasingly turning to design agencies like IDEO rather than traditional management consultants to help drive innovation even at the organizational level, a trend that's consistent with Garr Reynold's insight that being design mindful is an asset in any undertaking. More and more, "design" is about structuring the way people interact with the world around them.

But let's get into Sato's insights into creative thinking, and how to develop it. The first part of his book is structured around seven suggestions for developing the creative mind. I'll list them here, and dive into the first three, saving the next four for a later post.

Developing the Creative Mind

1. Are your assumptions correct? - Questioning as the starting point of creativity.

2. Listen to what people say. - The power of the interview to elicit your client's true feelings.

3. When worried or confused, try writing down your thoughts. - Giving order to your feelings.

4. Cultivate the habit of mitate. - Communicating the essence through analogy.

7. Capture the heart through presentation. - Moving from persuasion to empathy.

1. Are your assumptions correct? - Questioning is the starting point of creativity.

"There are many ways to develop the creative mind - not just one - but the most important is embracing the question: Are things right the way they are?" You can't expect dynamic change without questioning the assumptions of past practice and common wisdom. Embarking upon any endeavor without first examining the assumptions can lead you far from the mark. At the same, time, questioning does not necessarily mean always negating the way things are or creating change for change's sake. Making an effort to calmly examine things from different angles is a good way to start the creative thinking process. If you feel something is not quite right but aren't confident enough to start a public debate, Sato suggests starting by privately questioning the way things are with colleagues. You may find agreement, or you may find another opinion that broadens your perspective.

Sato mentions a few historical figures who questioned the status quo - such as Edison and Galileo. To bring the idea closer to home, however, I can think of one example that stands out in my own career. Several years ago, a Japanese client asked for my agency's help in launching a portable photo printer. He came into the meeting with a product positioning firmly in his mind: He wanted to call it the "living-room printer." This was obviously not right, but contradicting him was not going to work. So we decided to do some low-budget research by contacting current owners of some of the company's other products and inviting them in for a product demonstration over lunch. The resounding reaction was that it was like having your own photo lab, and since it printed in 85 seconds, we suggested calling it the "85 second photo lab." After showing our client video of the group and a few illustrations of a neon sign reminscent of the traditional "one hour photo lab," we were able to convince him. The result was one of the most fun and effective campaigns I have been associated with, and while that doesn't happen every day, it does prove it is possible. In a later post, I'll show how Sato used this principle to fundamentally refashion a Japanese clothing retailer's business model.

2. Listen to what people say. - The power of the interview to elicity your client's true feelings.

Communication skills are essential to any work, but because most of the time we communicate without being fully conscious of it, it may be difficult to understand how we can improve. Sato breaks his method down into four simple principles:

Listen carefully to what others say.

Try to grasp the intention behind their words.

Carefully order your own thoughts.

Communicate in a way that's easy to understand.

As Sato concedes, this is all completely common-sense, but these basics are actually hard to put into practice. We must try to be more mindful about how we communicate.

The first skill to develop is that of accurately listening to what the other person is trying to say, as a doctor or counselor would. Too often we enter into business discussions seeking to communicate our own point of view, so that even if we understand what our client is saying on the surface, the effect is a one-way conversation. A more productive way of communicating with your client is to take a stance of aggressively drawing out their thoughts. Sato likes to compare opening meetings with clients to performing a medical consultation. By calmly listening to your client's concerns, you slowly surface various problems and identify core elements.

Sato calls this a process of "turning thoughts into information." You need to make an active effort to make your client express his thoughts in words. Again, this sounds like utter common sense, but what I love about Sato's writing is his relentless focus on the fundamental concepts we tend to ignore.This attitude reminds me of a conversation I had with a former head of PR for several major companies, who told me he saw his job as "interrogating CEOs until they confessed a strategy." Here's a more elegant way of putting it by Nancy Duarte, CEO of Duarte Design, from Garr Reynolds' Presentation Zen:

When sketching for a client, it's important to listen to what they say, but it's more important to identify the intent of what they didn't say. - Nancy Duarte

Once you think you have a firm understanding of your client's real issues, Sato recommends restating them in different words. "So what you're aiming for is X." Or, "in other words, this is what you want to achieve." This is where "ordering your thoughts" and "communicating in a way that's easy to understand" come into play. If you're off the mark, the next step is to ask how. Ideally, after a few rounds of question-and-answer, you should succeed in closing any gap in undertanding.

However, there may be cases when you just can't bring things into focus. If you run into that problem, rather than walking away and hoping you'll come up with an acceptable solution, Sato suggests it is better in the long run to take a more radical approach. Recognize that you seem to be having trouble reaching agreement on the goals of the project and suggest looking at the basic business issues from square one - in essence, starting over. Taking care to show respect for your client and making him understand that the success of the project is paramount in your mind, you can even recommend suspending the project for a few days while you both think things over. The idea might surprise your clients, but hopefully it will shock them into reexamining their goals.

One of the perceptive insights that guides Sato's philosophy is that it's just incredibly difficult to understand what other people are thinking and what their words really mean. I can think of several times earlier in my career when a client asked me to produce "concepts" and I later wished I had asked what exactly they meant by "concept." Making the extra effort to play the role of a doctor aggressively trying to identify the symptoms behind a patient's complaints might well save the pain of a botched operation.

3. When worried or confused, try writing down your thoughts. - Giving order to your feelings.

Sato frequently reflects on periods of doubt and uncertainty during the formative years in which he graduated from art school and started work in corporate advertising, and how he found a way of working through his problems by writing them down. When we are emotionally worked up about something, our thoughts tend to be confused and somewhat undefined. Getting into the habit of arranging these thoughts into words helps move them from the level of abstraction and into the realm of logic.

Writing down whatever thoughts come to us makes our feelings visible. It helps to unburden the mind, like dumping out the contents of your bag. While you can start with simple words and phrases, Sato recommends asking yourself some questions to stimulate problem-solving. Just as when interviewing a client, going through several rounds of questions and answers can help to zero in on the underlying issues.

Here's an example, adapted from an illustration in the book:

You can look at this as an extension of the principle of "Listening to what people say." Except you're listening to yourself! In that sense, the usefulness of writing down our thoughts underscores the importance of two habits to Sato's approach to creative thinking:

Ask questions.

Turn thoughts into information.

Questioning assumptions. Questioning others. Questioning yourself. Asking questions leads to better information. Sato Kashiwa's approach to creative thinking is really about taking steps to ensure you're communicating effectively and working with the best information. Only then can you come up with creative solutions. In my next few posts, you'll see how this applies to the rest of his principles, and to his work.

July 28, 2010

Last night the MIT/Stanford Venture Lab (VLAB) put on a great panel discussion on innovation with Marissa Mayer of Google, Tim Brown of IDEO, and Randy Komisar of Kleiner Perkins. VLAB is a forum for entrepreneurs to connect with each other and investors and discuss how to grow high-tech ventures. For people like me in the marketing field, VLAB meetings and events present a rare opportunity to get a glimpse of future technologies and meet people who are working to create the next big thing.

The theme of the panel was "pivoting to success" through iteration. If success is defined as user acceptance of your product, the idea of iteration is to expose your product early through user testing or beta releases and, in the words of Mayer, "let users tell you where to go." She compared it to sailing, where instead of making a straight line towards your goal, you generally need to tack to the left and right until you get there.

Mayer shared some lucid insights into past Google product launches. With the first release of Google News, a launch postponement gave the team a few extra days, which the team decided would give them enough time to add either search by date or search by location. Since they couldn't agree, they left the decision to user response. The day of launch, they received 300 emails asking for search by date, vs. 3 requesting search by location. While in retrospect search by date now seems a no-brainer, Mayer shared a very sane perspective on product development: "It's innovation, not instant perfection."

The advantage of releasing early and iterating until you've reached the level of acceptance you desire isthat you'll tend to stick closer to your desired trajectory. The risk of developing your product behind the curtain, and waiting to release until you feel it's perfect, is that during the interim, you may find out you are very far from what users want, and end up with a dud. Everyone seemed to agree that Apple's culture of keeping products tightly under wraps is the old-school outlier, and their success relies on the uncanny instincts of Steve Jobs.

Randy Komisar stressed the importance of investing in research. He told the story of one company he had invested in who requested $9MM in development funding. Instead, he have them $3MM for prototyping and research. The first round cost $1MM and revealed that users were uninterested in most of the original features except for one. The second $1MM revealed another flawed assumption. Using the last $1MM for a final round, they found their sweet spot and the path to profitability.

When each of the panelists was asked to sum up their points in six words, Komisar seemed to sum it up best: "Investing in iteration immensely improves innovation."

Another attendee has posted a more detailed recap of the discussion. See the interesting blog Womennovation. I suppose one thing to keep in mind is that the panelists for the most part were referring to interactive products, where it is relatively easy to test out pieces and iterate as you go. As Tim Brown pointed out, however, IDEO has mastered the art of rapid prototyping physical products as well. For those of us who work for advertising agencies, the idea of iterating through a campaign launch bumps up against the wall of client acceptance and limited advertising budgets. For clients who can afford test markets, however, this is a viable path.

As a blogger, I took some encouragement from Marissa Mayer's insight, which bears repeating: It's innovation, not immediate perfection. We all want the perfect blog right away, but most of us have to experiment as we go, and see what works.

July 23, 2010

As I anticipate the new season of Mad Men, I recall one of my favorite scenes from a past episode, in which Don Draper presents his idea for the naming of a Kodak slide projector.

Those were the days before PowerPoint. Ad agencies didn't have computers
to make presentations on. They had their clients flip through reports
around the conference table. Or they mounted their presentations on
large boards and propped them on an easel. Or they printed out
transparencies and showed them on an overhead projector. Or perhaps they
used slide projectors.

Normally, Don Draper doesn't even make presentations; he simply presents. He creates an atmosphere through his words and voice and then ... unveils the idea. With his cool composure and controlled creativity, Don Draper presents the
fictionalized ideal of a persuasive salesman that many advertising
people I know today aspire to emulate. Perhaps we think: That's the way advertising should be - about the power of an idea, pure and unencumbered by too many props, too many pages of PowerPoint.

In this episode, however, Don Draper does use a prop. He presents using the slide projector he's been asked to name. And in doing so he creates one of those magical moments in the conference room that most of us only dream of. See the episode here.

Where does this lead? Well, aside from looking forward to the season premiere of Mad Men, it makes me think how much more powerful our presentations might be if we looked at PowerPoint more as a slide-show tool than a medium for projecting words on the wall. Why not simply say what we mean, and simply project some images as a backdrop? Or perhaps, as Don Draper normally does, don't show anything at all, until it's time to withdraw the veil...

July 21, 2010

After returning from a trip to Japan and recovering from jet-lag, I have lots to write about - too much to fit in one blog post! So I'm going to order my thoughts and write about something that has been on my mind for some time, and is perhaps tangentially related to my experience with Japan.

I recently started reading Dale Carnegie. In the jaded ignorance of my college years, the idea of reading someone like Carnegie would have seemed somehow laughable, and I've maintained a skeptical view of all things that smack of "self-improvement" with which he'd become associated in my mind. But when I picked up How to Stop Worrying and Start Living off a shelf in the office a couple of months ago, I was immediately struck by the power, simplicity, and wisdom in his writing.

One of the more powerful images in this book is the idea of living in "day-tight compartments;" that is, not allowing regrets of yesterday or fears of tomorrow leak into the day. The phrase was borrowed from eminent Canadian physician William Osler, who advised sealing off each day like a water-tight compartment. You could also look at it as employing fire-doors on the past and future. In any case, I found Carnegie's emphasis on focusing on the present, the facts, on matters-at-hand to be feel almost Zen Buddhist or Taoist in spirit.

I recall my Tai Ch'i teacher talking about the importance of focusing on one thing at a time, and while this isn't exclusively Eastern wisdom by any means, nevertheless I have found that practicing Tai Ch'i and meditating have made me more sensitive to taking things "step by step." Actually, Carnegie has a great gift for organizing the wisdom of sages from many ages and cultures, combining them with real-life stories from his contemporaries and students, and using these words and anecdotes to crystallize a very powerful philosophy of life around the threads that run through his books.

One of the more surprising passages in How to Win Friends and Influence People is another quote, this time from a contemporary publisher named Elbert Hubbard, on the importance of smiling:

" Whenever you go out-of-doors, draw the chin in, carry the crown of the head high, and fill the lungs to the utmost ... greet your friends with a smile and put soul into every handclasp...Try to fix firmly in your mind what you would like to do...Thought is supreme. Preserve a right mental attitude..."

I'm sorry, but this entire passage just exudes a martial arts ethos. The first sentence in particular describes with uncanny accuracy the correct position for holding your head in meditation. Again, the words aren't Carnegie's, but he seems to have this interesting inclination towards a Buddhist outlook.

July 05, 2010

Last week just after I packed my family off for a month in Japan, the land of Presentation Zen, I found a "Business Tip of the Day" about a new Harvard Business Review Guide to Persuasive Presentations. It's a collection of useful tips by various authors on everything from preparing visuals to overcoming stage-fright. The "Business Tip" summary boils the contents down to four main points:

Figure out the question you're answering

Create the opener

Draft the ending

Put it together and edit down

While highly simplified, I found a lot of similarities between these points and Garr Reynolds' approach, in particular his suggestion that we should approach presentations as telling a story.

"Figuring out the question you're answering" is about knowing what you want to communicate to your audience and crafting your presentation with their needs and situation in mind.

To "create the opener," the guide recommends starting off with a story or anecdote. As Garr has frequently pointed out, human beings are storytellers, and respond well to stories. A good story at the opening is a great way to engage your audience's emotions in that critical first ten minutes of your presentation. Garr has a good Garr has a good post
featuring Ira Glass on treating presentations like stories here.

To "draft the ending" is to leave your audience not just with a summary of what you've just presented, but to present some action you'd like them to take. After all, a presentation, just like advertising, is generally done with the purpose of getting people to do something.

Last, "putting it together and editing down" is probably the most time-consuming portion, and is critical to maintaining your audience's attention. In a recent post on Dr. John Medina's book Brain Rules, I mentioned Medina's suggestion that ideally you should shift gears every ten minutes to maintain a high interest level. I think the most practical way of "putting it together and editing down" is Garr's practice of storyboarding presentations.

Most of us who create presentations have fallen into the trap of putting them together directly in PowerPoint. This is a sure-fire way to get bogged down in the details, lose sight of the big picture, and succumb to the temptation of attempting to include everything you want to say in a few over-stuffed slides.

Storyboarding, however, lets you lay out the outline of the whole presentation visually, then go back to PowerPoint to construct it and fill in the details. Garr writes a bit about storyboarding here, but you'll get more of a how-to if you buy his book, Presentation Zen. Garr recommends getting "off the grid," that is, getting away from your office, leaving your laptop behind, and sketching out your ideas in storyboard frames on blank paper, or using post-it notes that you can rearrange later on your wall.

This practice is good for at least two reasons. One, by looking at your slides as frames, it gives you a way to grasp the whole and organize it into major thematic sections. Two, having to work within the frames forces you to keep the ideas on each slide simple, encouraging you to draw pictures of what you want to say and come up with short headlines. Storyboarding helps you look at your presentation more as a slide-show, in which you are presenting visuals and big ideas that back up the story you're going to tell.

So, check out all these books, and the next time you have to create a presentation, try storyboarding first, with the emphasis on telling a story.

June 27, 2010

One great way to practice and
develop your presentation skills is to create a PowerPoint presentation
explaining someone else’s great ideas. If you feel like you don’t have time to
spend working on your PowerPoint style for fun, maybe you can find a reason to
present relevant expert thinking to people you work with, or even clients. If
you’re serious about raising the level of presentation skills in your
workplace, perhaps you could organize an informal weekly lunch group where members
present to each other.

The other day I re-read a 2008
post by Garr Reynolds,
Brain Rules for PowerPoint & Keynote Presenters, which includes a
PowerPoint deck he created about Dr. John
Medina’s book Brain
Rules. Garr mentions that “Every year it seems a new book
comes out with practical applications for presenters and speakers, even though
it's not a book about presentations at all,” and Brain Rules is one of them. One
of the things I love about Garr Reynold’s blog is the way he focuses on what
makes an enjoyable experience for a presentation audience, and in doing so
draws from a wide range of writers on design, marketing, philosophy, and
psychology. His suggestions on how to create great slides and presentations
really emanate from a solid understanding of how to connect to people.

Garr’s presentation focuses on
three of Dr. Medina’s twelve rules that he finds most relevant to presentation.
I summarize what I took away as the main point of each:

Rule #1: Exercise boosts brain
power. – Most people in a lecture hall or conference room are already in a
static environment not conducive to thinking, so you have to be aware of that
and wake them up. The office or cubicle where you’re preparing your
presentation is another “anti-brain” environment – stepping away from the desk,
moving around, and exercising are going to keep your mind fresh.

Rule #4: People don’t pay
attention to boring things. – You have 10 minutes to grab an audience’s
attention, and then you have to change gears every 10 minutes after that to
keep it. The brain won’t process too much information at once, so you need to
focus on creating a structure around a few big ideas.

Rule #10: Vision trumps all other
senses. – Ditch slides packed with words and data points in favor of simple
ideas backed up by powerful images.

You’ll get a great feel for Garr’s
style by clicking through the presentation in this post. As you explore his blog and book,
and get a sense of his recommendations on slide design and storyboarding, you’ll
see that you don’t have to be a design expert to start building dramatically
better presentations – presentations that will make your bosses and co-workers
look at you in a whole new way.